People can understand us, we can understand them, including in deeper levels without approving of them or agreeing with them, or waiving our own rights and needs. Remembering that empathy is not agreement. Or even worse, a time when it was clear to you that the other person just couldn’t care less about actually trying to understand you. Just recall a time you felt misunderstood yourself. Empathic breakdowns, when there’s a lack of empathy, shake the foundation of a relationship. You know, people aware of the surface behavior of each other almost as like things moving through space, while remaining oblivious to their own inner lives, while being unmoved by your own. You know, imagine a day at work like this or with your family or with friends. So imagine a world in which people interacted with each other like ants or fish. We do ask, of course, that if you use the chat side bar, you focus on what’s helpful for you, your own practice, rather than criticizing or advising other people. I sometimes am able to glance and see the sidebar along the way, but if I’m not, be assured that I will have read certainly everything you’ve communicated to me tonight, even if I can’t respond to it right here and right now. Or if you don’t want to use the chat feature, just push that button and that side bar will disappear. If you like, you can use the chat feature to make comments or ask questions along the way. And then we’ll open it up to your questions and comments. I’ll have a number of practical suggestions, some of them grounded in the neural circuitry of empathy. So I’ll talk through some kind of key points here. Now, what I’d like to do is talk with you about a practice that I call See the Being Behind the Eyes, which is kind of a poetic way to get at the larger topic of empathy. But it’s a very beautifully heartfelt and embodied way to practice the wisdom of openness and spaciousness. It’s just an ongoing practice and you can explore it in different kinds of ways. And if you didn’t get a sense of that, it’s OK. And then increasingly, you can have a sense of a kind of upwelling, a spring rising in you, spreading through you and outward into the world. That seems like an appropriate introduction last week to the meditation that we did this week, in which if you could get a sense of it, there can be a natural opening into the love, broadly defined, that’s at the heart at the center of that spaciousness, that openness. And our life increasingly can become over time an expression of being lived in a sense by this powerful force. For myself, last week, as you may know, I talked about the experience, the feeling of being lived by love as love is a kind of upwelling or current buoying us nourishing us and strengthening and protecting us even as it moves through us. Henry is just a wonderful being deep teacher and really quite extraordinary. But before getting into that talk, I want to give a little announcement that next week and the week after, we will have a wonderful guest teacher, Henry Shukman, who is an abbot of a Zen monastery or Zen Center, actually, in New Mexico, and who is the author of multiple books, including one that just sort of blew my mind wide open in wonderful ways, One Blade of Grass, highly recommended. Rick Hanson Before I get into my topic about empathy and recognizing the being behind the eyes in others, which has many benefits, including helping us be in a stronger position to ask for understanding and empathy from others, and that they too recognize us as beings rather than objects to be kind of moved around by them. Endurance workout plan for beginners.Seeing the Person Behind the Eyes Talk (download transcript here)
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